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Microsoft sues over Google hire

Microsoft opened a lawsuit Tuesday against Google and a former Microsoft executive that the search giant had hired to run its China operations.

"Today Microsoft filed a lawsuit against a former executive and Google regarding breach of Microsoft's employee confidentiality and non-compete agreement," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in an e-mail. "We are asking the court to require Dr. Lee and Google to honor the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft."

Google has emerged as a top rival for Microsoft, and several notable employees have left the software giant for Google in recent months.

Lee, an expert in speech-recognition technology, founded Microsoft's China research lab in the late 1990s and worked at Silicon Graphics Inc. and Apple Computer before joining Microsoft.

Though workers leave tech companies for rivals all the time, it's not uncommon for a dispute to end up in court, particularly when an executive has a contract with a noncompete clause.

A Microsoft lawyer said in an interview that Lee's move to join Google was a "particularly egregious" violation of the non-compete agreement that he had signed when he joined Microsoft.

Lee had been working most recently at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash.

The combination of those factors meant that we really had no choice but to file this suit to protect our confidential information."

Resource: ZDNet

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